IN AUGUST of 2006, the PPCLI Recce platoon had secured a local educational facility known as “the white schoolhouse,” located in the Panjwaii district of Afghanistan. Taliban fighters counterattacked by launching a volley of RPGs—rocket-propelled grenades—into the school, killing four Canadian soldiers and wounding many others from the PPCLI. The PPCLI fought ferociously, but recce platoons travel light to move fast and they hadn’t planned for an extended battle. Also, a shortage of ammo and water forced them to reluctantly retreat, for the time being.
After the heavy fighting, the insurgents regained control of the schoolhouse, and NATO was forced to come up with a new strategy for getting the Taliban out of the Panjwaii district. That is when Operation Medusa was hatched—so named because tactically we needed to stop slaying individual snakes and this time slice off the entire head of the beast. This Canadian-led NATO operation was going to be different from anything we’d done so far. It was a bit of a wake-up call. So was the fact that my buddy Jeff Walsh had been killed in friendly fire in an accident that happened in August. Clearly we were entering a high-risk situation. That didn’t deter me in any way; if anything, it made my resolve stronger. I’d trained for this and I was ready.
The Taliban fighters in the Panjwaii area appeared to be numerous, determined and well organized. The offensive against them marked the first time Canadian soldiers had been involved in a ground assault of this magnitude since the Korean War. When we were getting our marching orders back at Kandahar Airfield, it became clear that each rifle company—Alpha, Bravo and Charles—wanted its own sniper unit for the mission. I led the sniper team with Barry and Kash for Charles Company. Our offensive and our first goal—known as Objective Rugby—was to take back the white schoolhouse. As you can imagine, there was considerable excitement among us to be involved in such a significant offensive. For me personally, this was why I had spent more than a decade training in the Armed Forces—to have this kind of ground opportunity. That schoolhouse had become a symbolic building for all of us, representing not only the Taliban’s resistance but the loss of four of our soldiers. Reclaiming it meant getting something back for them, a tribute to what they had accomplished that we were left to uphold in their names.
So when our commanding officer, Major Matthew Sprague, explained the mission, I expected a call to honour, an Any Given Sunday type of pep talk. But Major Sprague’s speech was very measured and deliberate. Don’t get me wrong: I have a ton of respect for Major Sprague, but I was surprised that his pre-offensive speech was so muted. On top of that, he gave an order that left a lot of us scratching our heads. “If anybody gets hurt during this mission,” he said, “we’re going to stop right away and take care of it. We are going to make sure the casualties are dealt with and then reassess the situation before moving forward.”
Wasn’t the whole point of a ground assault to create heavy momentum and push forward? In some ways, it almost sounded like a contradiction: “Let’s not take any casualties, but let’s try to kill the enemy.”
After the speech, Barry came over to me and said, “Either we’re going to kick some ass—or we’re going to get our asses kicked. It’s one or the other.”
Kash leaned in. “I think there are going to be a lot of people killed in this attack.”
Our job as snipers was to look at the battle plan for Charles Company and see how we could help them reach their objectives. The best way for us to help was to get to an elevated position around our soldiers. That way, we could keep watch and warn them about what was coming up ahead. From that vantage point, we would also be able to shoot at the enemy and provide cover for our troops, if either was needed. A group of Joint Task Force snipers was about to get on a plane to go home, but when orders for Operation Medusa came in, they stayed behind and joined us.
Before the mission started, we performed a “leaders’ recce.” The commanding officer, all the company commanders, the artillery commander, the engineering commander and the sniper-team leaders went out in vehicles to scout out the potential battlefield at Masum Ghar. There were quite a few of us, and we didn’t want to draw the attention of the enemy, so we tried to be as discreet as possible. I’m surprised the Taliban didn’t shoot at us while we were doing this recce mission, but for some reason they never did.
Masum Ghar is a fairly big mountain. I decided it would be the best spot for us to set up home base. The JTF2 sniper leader agreed. My group would set up about halfway up the mountain close to Charles company, while the JTF team would go even higher since their communications equipment was able to work at a higher altitude than ours. Having the JTF guys above us meant they had our backs, so that was cool with us.
After all of our spots were picked out, we headed back to Kandahar Airfield for final preparations. We were told to pack about a week’s worth of supplies—clothes, toiletries and anything else we would require. The plan was to be in the Masum Ghar area for about three days of preparation, with the ground assault happening on the fourth day. In an ideal world, the entire Objective Rugby—taking back the schoolhouse and re-establishing control of the area—would take about seven days. As experienced as I was in packing for sniper missions, I was green when it came to packing for an operation like this. I wanted to make sure I was well stocked. I packed extra batteries for my radio, four gallons of water and as much ammo as I could fit in every single pocket.
We departed Kandahar just before Labour Day, heading out at night for a “leaguer,” which is when troops form a provisional camp by parking together in one spot overnight. As we hung around the vehicles, the engineers did a sweep of the area with mine detectors.
I asked one of the engineers, “Hey bro, do you really think there are mines around here?”
“Yeah, we think so,” he responded, looking at me sideways from underneath his helmet as though I was an idiot. At that very second, his sweeper started beeping. “There’s one right here,” he said nonchalantly. He pulled out a can of orange spray paint and marked the spot where the land mine was buried. I felt a bit foolish for asking my question, but I didn’t say anything. All I could think was, “Holy shit, the entire company is parked on a minefield.” Whether it was bravado or complete ignorance, nobody else seemed overly concerned. We were simply told to avoid stepping anywhere near the spray-painted areas the engineers had identified.
As we were getting ready the next morning to push ahead to Masum Ghar, dozens upon dozens of vehicles passed us—filled with hundreds of fighting-age males who were probably Taliban fighters, though they were unarmed. They stared at us as they drove past, but what we noticed was that they were heading the wrong way. It’s like they were getting the hell out of Dodge before all hell broke loose. We had put out strong signals that we were coming in for an aggressive assault, so maybe the word that we meant business was spreading. Maybe they were trying to minimize their losses. Instead of having a thousand soldiers die, it was in their best interests to have only a hundred killed.
As they fled in the opposite direction, we headed to our battle position at Masum Ghar. We pulled into our spot and the ramp for our vehicle dropped. It was time to head out to our designated positions. For me and my sniper unit, that meant we had to trek up the side of the mountain. I sat on the ramp and looped my arms through the shoulder straps of my rucksack, then I went to stand up—and couldn’t. I had packed so much into that rucksack that it probably weighed over a hundred pounds. One of the boys came down the ramp laughing. “Let me help ya out there, Jody!” He grabbed me and hoisted me to my feet.
“Thanks, bro,” I grunted. We both chuckled and gave each other knuckles. “Stay safe, brother,” he said. I winked at him, turned and headed up the mountain.
As I stared up the side of the mountain, I realized I had a pretty big dilemma on my hands. If I could barely stand wearing this heavy rucksack, how on earth was I going to walk uphill with it? Clearly, I’d made the rookie mistake of packing too much stuff for my first field assault. Maybe the adrenaline helped, because somehow I was able to head up the slope with Barry and Kash. But as we approached our preselected site, I noticed that it was already occupied. A bunch of Afghan National Army, or ANA, soldiers were in our spot, alongside a couple of American soldiers. The ANA soldiers were always accompanied by one or two senior American officers who oversaw what they were doing. In this case, Dexter, an old, grizzled American captain, was in charge. I had met Dexter a few days earlier during the recce.
“Hey Dexter,” I said, “I think your ANA guys are in our spot.”
“Okay, we’ll move out,” he responded, and soon enough, they did. Once they were gone, I saw why this spot was so amazing. Not only did it have a bird’s-eye view of the river valley and the battleground below, it also had an overhang of rocks, which made for a nice shaded resting spot.
Once we were alone, we started doing what snipers do in these situations: planning. We mapped out the area from our vantage point and started doing up our range cards. This helped us get a better understanding of the terrain and more quickly identify the area where a target might be. We laser-measured targets for a more accurate idea of the distances we were dealing with. That way, if we saw an enemy fighter standing next to a rock or a tree, we could quickly calculate how far away he was from us. But the enemy was pretty far away. We figured the closest stronghold was at a distance of approximately 1800 metres, so shooting them from our position was going to be pretty tough. From what we could see, though, there was a lot of movement at the enemy base.
The other units were also getting into position. LAV IIIs and Coyote armoured reconnaissance and surveillance vehicles were moving to their spots, while the artillery guys were doing their final preparations as well. The artillery forward observation officer, or FOO, was starting to call in preparatory artillery strikes. It was a free-fire zone, so anyone who thought they had a target was allowed to take a shot. While everybody prepped the target area for the battle ahead, Kash noticed something in the distance: a bunch of enemy fighters in a farmer’s field. When I’d been looking through the binos earlier, I hadn’t seen anything, but that was typical. Barry and I could spend hours at the glass and see absolutely nothing, but the second Kash picked up a pair of binoculars, out came the enemy. On this day, Kash’s eagle eyesight came in handy, and as usual, he spotted Taliban fighters before anybody else did.
When we watched them further, it became evident that these guys were keeping an eye on Canadian movement. They were looking through their own binoculars and using their radios to relay information. They were about three thousand metres away.
I radioed the artillery FOO at the bottom of the hill. I wanted to call in some heavy artillery, the new M777, from the Canadian 155 howitzer battery that had positioned itself next to Patrol Base Wilson for Operation Medusa. “I have a fire mission for you, what appears to be a reinforced enemy position,” I said. I started the procedure to call in an artillery strike, giving the enemy’s map grid, position, compass bearing and distance.
“I can’t see them from here,” the artillery commander interrupted me.
Of course he couldn’t see them. He was sitting on a lawn chair next to his vehicle half as high up the mountain as I was. “That’s fine. I have clear view. Clearly an enemy position. Fire mission. Over,” I said into the radio.
There was a long pause, and I could see him looking through his binos in the direction of the enemy. “I still can’t see them,” he repeated.
“Yes, I understand.” I kept my tone diplomatic but forceful. “But I have clear view. I’m the sniper team. We just need the green light.”
“It’s day one here,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of ammo and we want to try to conserve it.”
I wasn’t sure what that had to do with us calling in an artillery barrage on Taliban fighters. I was getting to the point where I wanted to run down to the bottom of the mountain and head-butt this guy.
A couple of minutes later, he came back over the radio. “Okay, here’s what we can do. I can give you six rounds.” That translated to twenty-four rounds, because it’s six rounds times four guns in the battery. If we couldn’t nail these guys with twenty-four rounds, then the gods of war were smiling on them, not us. But then he added, “That’s six rounds total.”
“Six rounds?” I said. “Including corrections?” You always need to take a round or two and then correct your shot based on the round’s proximity to the target. If we had only six rounds total, that would leave probably four to fire for effect on the enemy.
“Yes, six rounds total. Including corrections,” he barked back.
Fine. It was better than nothing. The first round I called in clearly got the enemy’s attention. It landed within two hundred metres of them, and it’s kind of hard not to notice when a 155 millimetre howitzer shell lands that close to you. Most of the guys started scurrying off, looking for cover or heading to their bunker areas. But there was this one fighter dressed in camouflage with a scarf around his neck and a round hat on his head. While everybody else was fleeing the area, he was just standing there as if nothing was happening. I had four rounds left and was on target, so I made the radio call for effect, thereby unleashing the artillery to fire their rounds as quickly as possible, completely saturating the area with explosions and shrapnel—well, in this case, four rounds’ worth—aimed right where the guy with the scarf was standing.
As I heard artillery going off in the distance, the Taliban fighter turned and started to casually stroll away, unfazed when more rounds landed all around him. One of the blast forces blew his scarf off his shoulder. He readjusted it, flicking it over his shoulder in an almost “fuck you” manner, and continued his stroll as the four rounds finished landing. With no more artillery to call in, all I could do was watch him walk away. That’s an image that will be burned into my brain for the rest of my life.
I turned to Barry and Kash. “Did you see that? That guy’s got balls of steel! I love that fucking guy!” That was the last I saw of him.
Our first night on the side of the mountain was as adventure-filled as the day—but for different reasons. We slept in shifts at night, and each of us had a two-hour patrol and four hours of sleep. While I was on patrol that night, nature called. I had my little Ziploc bag with me, and inside were a couple of “toilet tickets” and some wet-wipes. I headed out to do my business. The moonlight was pretty intense that night, so I didn’t wear my night-vision goggles or use a flashlight. After finding a good spot, I tossed my Ziploc onto the ground and started to take off my gear. It’s not that easy being a soldier in this situation, because you have to drop your rifle, your frag vest and a whole bunch of other stuff before you can get down to business. Finally, I was all set and started to squat—but then I heard a distinct crunching noise very close by. Then I heard crackling. And it was getting louder. I froze. “What the fuck is that noise?” I thought to myself. “Someone crumpling paper? But why would somebody be doing that at two in the morning?”
The sound continued. I started to reach down for my rifle when I suddenly recognized the sound. It was thin plastic being shredded. I looked down and realized that my Ziploc bag of toiletries was covered in massive black ants. They were swarming the Ziploc, and their teeth were so big they were actually crunching through the plastic. The sheer number of these insects was mind-boggling. I’d chosen a terrible spot for what I needed to do: a thriving anthill.
I looked down at my boots, where a bunch of ferocious black ants were now crawling onto me. I jumped up and started stomping wildly to get them off. I still hadn’t done what I came out there to do. But to do that, I needed my Ziploc bag, which was still covered in ants. I put on my combat gloves and pulled out my Gerber tool, which was equipped with a pair of pliers. I carefully picked up the Ziploc bag with the pliers and I smashed it against the ground over and over again. The mandibles of the ants were so strong that it took me a while to knock them all off. Finally, my boots and Ziploc were clean, and I decided I’d better find another location for my solo mission.
•
The unpleasant ant experience, coupled with minimal sleep, put me in a foul mood the next day. I actually got into a bit of an argument with Warrant Officer Rick Nolan, who was the quartermaster for Charles Company. I had known Rick for quite a while—I trained under him with the recce platoon—and knew him to be a stand-up guy. We needed to get some supplies delivered to us at the side of the mountain and he wanted us to come down from our position to get them.
“Can you at least drive them to the base of the mountain for us?” I asked.
“Why can’t you just come down here and get them yourselves?” he fired back.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had had a bad night. Or maybe tensions were running high because we all knew that the attack was imminent. I went down the mountain to get the supplies, and they were waiting right where I’d asked Rick to leave them. Still, it took me three trips to get all the supplies back up to our sniper position.
It was now our second day in position. It was still dark, but I noticed there was a ton of activity and a buzz at the base of the mountain. Vehicles were starting up and soldiers were bustling about, packing up their gear. Why were they gearing up when we were still about twenty-four hours away from our scheduled offensive attack?
I turned to Kash, who had been on watch the last few hours. “Did you hear anything over the radio that would prompt all that action?”
“Nope. Nothing at all,” he responded.
I picked up my radio and called down to Major Sprague. “This is 6-3 Charlie. What’s going on down there?” We always used our call signs when addressing each other over the radio.
“Pack up. Get down here. We’re going in,” Major Sprague replied.
“Has there been a change of plans?” I asked again.
“Don’t have time to explain. Just get your asses down here now,” he ordered.
“Roger that,” I said.
We quickly packed up all of our gear. For whatever reason, the schedule had been moved up by about a day. We came down the mountain and we were going to join the platoon at the base, but just before we got to the bottom, I got this weird feeling. I knew the area was secure, but I decided to call in on the radio and alert everybody that we were approaching, just in case.
“All call signs 3, this is 6-3 Charlie. We are approaching you from your left flank position. Please acknowledge.”
I got a couple of confirmations from the radio. We had the all-clear to approach. It was a good thing I got clearance on the radio because I was told later that a couple of our guys spotted us in their thermal binoculars and were preparing to take us out.
I found Major Sprague sitting inside the command hatch of his LAV, putting on his helmet. This was a man who was carrying the weight of leading the first deliberate Canadian assault since Korea.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“Well, we’re going in now,” he responded. He was doing up his chin strap but you could tell his mind was ten steps ahead, thinking about all the things that could happen once we crossed the Arghandab River. As the saying goes, “No plan lasts longer than first contact with the enemy.” And Major Sprague knew it.
“Any other changes to the plan besides the time?”
“No. All the same.” He made an effort to focus on me for a second, his sniper-team leader. “So what do you want to do?” he asked.
“Let’s stick to the original plan,” I said. “You guys take Objective Rugby. Once the white schoolhouse is secure, my team and I will go to the roof, set up our sniper position and cover you as you move to the next objective.”
“Good to go,” Major Sprague said. “Fall in with the battle captain’s LAV and let’s roll.”
Captain Trevor Norton would be in charge of the armoured vehicles once the troops dismounted. In ground-fighting situations, the LAVs become a mobile heavy weapons fire base. You manoeuvre them to an area and concentrate their fire to suppress the enemy in the target area. The troops on foot can then start advancing, with the fire base shifting fire to always be in front of them. This is a technique Canadians mastered in World War I.
Before getting into the LAV, I took a good look at the vehicles around us. I was surprised by the lack of combat engineering vehicles such as combat bulldozers and obstacle-clearing equipment. What we did have was what appeared to be a Zettelmeyer front-loader. It was painted green and had what we call “hillbilly armour”—steel welded into place to provide some kind of protection, added at the last minute. We also had a green medium-sized bulldozer that had been borrowed from the British contingent, but it appeared to have no armour on it. We needed these vehicles because we were dealing with irrigation ditches, berms and walls made out of heavy clay, as well as thick marijuana fields that needed to be cleared to allow other vehicles to pass. The Zettelmeyer is a very light vehicle that has no business being on the front of an assault. Looking around, I had to wonder if this equipment was adequate for an assault of this magnitude. But it was too late to worry about it now.
Barry, Kash and I jumped into Captain Norton’s LAV. It was a tight fit with our massive rucksacks and all our extra sniper equipment. The LAV’s rear hull hatches, called air sentry hatches, were open, and two soldiers were sticking out observing what was going on. We pulled out from our position and started our approach towards the white schoolhouse. I was inside the LAV and unable to see out. I was listening on my radio so that I could keep track of what was happening. The original plan was to advance straight towards the schoolhouse, but as we approached, the lead vehicles were swinging to the right on a different path from the one that had been mapped out. It’s almost like the lead vehicles were trying to connect to a road instead of clearing a path.
Major Sprague got on the radio. “Okay. Stop. I don’t want to go in that direction. I want you to stay away from the main road you’re heading towards because it’s most likely filled with IEDs and land mines. Stick to the plan we made,” he said. “Take your time. Slow down, and let’s everybody do this properly.”
After that, we were moving slowly but surely. There was the normal banter over the radio as everyone fell in and started following the major’s orders.
Up ahead, the first vehicles were closing in on the white schoolhouse. The Zettelmeyer had cleared a way for the lead platoon—comprising four LAVs and a G Wagon—to take a position next to the schoolhouse.
It was at this point that the Taliban decided to make their presence known by firing an anti-tank recoilless rifle round at the softest vehicle of this lead platoon—the G Wagon. The round went right through the front windshield, causing immediate casualties.
Next, our whole assault opened up all at once—every cannon, every coaxial machine gun was firing. Taliban were coming out of the weeds all around us, out of tunnels, windows, mouse holes. They had held their powder to the last second, and then it was game on. They had the defender’s advantage, and they used it.
The call went out on the radio that one of our vehicles was hit and we had casualties. As this was happening, one of the LAVs that was next to the schoolhouse went nose-first into a ditch and was stuck. I was trying to listen on the radio when suddenly the troops who were sticking out of the top hatches on our LAV yelled, “Holy fuck, they’re right there!” They let go a burst from their C7s, followed by a grenade from a rifle-mounted grenade launcher. It was never the plan for our LAV at the back of the convoy to be engaged like this, but because we’d driven right into an enemy trap, the guys up top had no choice but to defend.
At that moment, our artillery began raining down and air support started dropping bombs on the Taliban. A massive bomb landed right on target but bounced off a couple of buildings and rolled right next to the LAV that was occupied by Major Sprague. I’ll never forget hearing Major Sprague over the radio: “What the fuck! Is that a five-hundred-pound bomb that just landed next to our vehicle?” Fortunately it didn’t detonate, or else Major Sprague and everybody in the vicinity would have been obliterated.
I felt helpless during all of this chaos, because the plan for us as snipers was to get involved only once Objective Rugby had been achieved. At that point, we would get up on the school’s roof and provide cover for the bound to the next objective. But in this situation, Barry, Kash and I were stuck inside the LAV right at the time when our shooting skills were needed most up top. I was working the radio, doing my best to keep everyone in the vehicle informed of what was happening up ahead.
“Okay, we’ve got three WIA and one KIA,” I said, relaying the message that there were three wounded soldiers and one who was killed in the G Wagon that had been hit. Every soldier had a “zap number,” which was to be used as an identifier in case you were wounded or killed in the field. Standard operating procedure was that if someone died in combat, you never revealed their name during the battle. At this point, we didn’t know which soldier had been killed in that attack on the G Wagon. And no one seemed to know the zap number either.
Finally, Major Sprague got on the radio. “I need to know now! Who the fuck just got killed?”
The radio crackled and a voice came on. “It was Warrant Officer Rick Nolan, sir.”
Rick Nolan was the soldier I’d had the brief argument with the day before. I have always felt bad that our last conversation was a little strained. Rick was a good man and a great soldier. Sitting in the front seat of that G Wagon, he had no chance of surviving a direct rocket hit.
I looked at Barry and Kash. We were all stunned into silence. No matter how much you prepare for the moment when a soldier you know becomes a casualty, there’s nothing that compares to the actual feeling. On top of that, it was jarring for all of us, because we just didn’t expect a soldier with his level of experience and status to be the first one taken out on the mission.
Suddenly our LAV accelerated hard and fast. We drove for what seemed quite a distance. We were flying so fast over uneven terrain that we were all getting tossed around. We then slammed to a bone-jarring stop and Captain Norton gave the order to drop ramp. I reached over, flipped the switch and lowered the ramp at the back of our LAV. As snipers, we don’t have to wear frag vests or helmets while on missions. We just had our tactical load-bearing gear on us. In hindsight, given the situation, we probably should have been wearing all the protection possible, but we often chose not to.
Once the ramp was dropped, we saw Sergeant Scott Fawcett directing traffic on the ground. With Scott was the driver of the G Wagon that had been hit. He’d been sitting next to Warrant Officer Nolan when he was killed. He was understandably shaken up, his eyes the size of dinner plates. He didn’t have a scratch on him.
He turned to me with a look of shock in his eyes and said, “Did you know the windshield of that G Wagon didn’t have bulletproof glass?”
I stared at him for a second. I wanted to tell him there’s no such thing as bulletproof glass, that some glass is bullet-resistant, but there was nothing on earth that was going to stop anti-tank fire from penetrating a G Wagon. But I kept quiet. All I said was, “Yeah, bro.”
Just then, Sergeant Fawcett approached. “We need your help evacuating the wounded,” he said. A medic in the back of Rick’s G Wagon had been badly injured. Our LAV would transport him to safety. This spot turned into a casualty collection point at the front of the battle. Usually, you want to move your casualties farther back from the edge of fighting and establish a collection point there. But this was a chaotic situation and so we had to improvise.
The back of our LAV was full of all of our sniper gear, so we started rearranging it to make room for wounded personnel. I walked down the ramp to bring the wounded medic into our LAV. I grabbed him under his good arm. His right shoulder was ripped open, a mangled mess. It was so badly damaged I could see his bone. As I walked him up the ramp, from the corner of my eye I saw the interpreter from Rick’s G Wagon being led away, his head back, hands held over his face, blood pouring out of his eyes.
“Hey bro,” I said to the medic. “We’re going to take you to the ambulance.” He didn’t respond. He groaned and held his shoulder. At that exact moment, a massive explosion went off behind us. The Zettelmeyer was taken out by another round from the Taliban recoilless rifles. These guys clearly knew how to use that weapon, because they were dead-on accurate—in complete contrast to their use of machine guns and rifles. The blast blew me forward and I felt the heat wave across my back. I spun around and saw smoke and dust swirling in the air. In the chaos of combat, time slows down. Every colour, smell and sound becomes heightened. A second feels like a minute. My peripheral vision went from 180 to 340 degrees in that moment. I saw one of our guys standing amid the dust. He spotted something and had this look on his face like “Holy fuck.” He threw his rifle across his back and bent down to pick up a casualty. Those few seconds felt like forever.
I quickly threw the medic into the back of the vehicle on top of all our gear, then we closed the ramp.
“Let’s get this guy out of here!” I said to the vehicle commander.
Captain Norton was in contact with other personnel and knew where the new casualty collection point had been set up. But as we were driving back across the moist riverbed and away from the front lines, our LAV got stuck in the sand. This turned out to be a problem for a lot of our LAV vehicles.
The injured medic was sitting with his head down, saying, “Holy fuck! Holy fuck!” over and over. His shoulder was bleeding profusely and he was clearly in a lot of pain. We were sitting around him, me and my two snipers, trying to calm him down. The LAV wasn’t going anywhere, despite the driver’s attempts to push through. One of the guys up top came down. “We’re stuck,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Upon hearing this, I shrugged, reached up, flicked the switch to lower the ramp, looked at Barry and said, “Are you coming?” Barry knew what I was planning to do. He didn’t say a word, just nodded and started out of the vehicle. When we got to the bottom of the ramp, we could see the Bison ambulance and the new casualty collection point a few hundred metres away.
“Kash, you stay back with the vehicle. Barry, you provide cover.” I went back into the LAV. “Okay, bro, we’re going for a little walk,” I said as I put the medic’s good arm over my shoulders and grabbed his belt so I could take as much of his weight as possible. “Just don’t stop moving your legs,” I told him.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
“You can do it! I’ve got you.” And with that, we took off running, with Barry leading the way, rifle poised. It was about a three hundred metre sprint to the ambulance. Bullets were flying over our heads and mortar rounds were landing all around. It felt like we were running in slow motion. Every sight I saw was super-HD. My legs were burning but it was inconsequential and I moved through it. The medic on my shoulders was a big guy, but that didn’t matter either. I felt his legs moving next to me as he tried to help me carry his weight. Some Afghan National Army soldiers were to my left, some American Humvees on the other side. Vehicles were driving in all directions. As we approached the last hundred metres, the worst of the fighting was behind us.
When we got to the Bison ambulance, it was buttoned up tight. I hammered on the ramp with my rifle. “Open up, open up!” I yelled. “We have one of your own fucking guys here! A medic!”
They lowered the ramp and time sped back up. The medics inside were pretty surprised to see a fellow medic in such bad shape. They took him inside. “Hey man,” I told him, “you’re with your own now. They’ll take care of you.” Before leaving, I had one more thing to settle. I couldn’t figure out why this ambulance was parked in a way that left the ramp exposed to enemy fire. It made them sitting ducks. I went to the front to talk to the driver. “Why don’t you turn this thing around so your armoured side is facing the enemy?”
“Yeah, okay,” the driver said with a nod. He turned the vehicle around, which made Barry and me feel a whole lot better.
Then Barry and I stood outside the ambulance, taking a tactical breather. As we watched our own vehicle getting pulled out of the sand, Kash emerged from the chaos, rifle in hand. At first I thought I should be mad since I’d given him orders to stay put, but all I could feel was happy to see him. I knew if it were my team out there, I wouldn’t have been able to stay put either.
We weren’t sure what to do next, but we sure weren’t keen on making a sprint back to our LAV until it was mobile again, so we stayed near the ambulance to secure the area. A few minutes later, another LAV rolled in next to the ambulance. One of the soldiers up top said, “Guys, give us a hand. We’ve got a KIA with us here.” This was my buddy Jeff’s unit, but I didn’t see Jeff. My stomach sank. “Who’s the KIA?” I asked.
“It’s Rick. Rick Nolan.”
When you’re a soldier and you find out your buddy wasn’t the one hit, your first thought is “At least it wasn’t my buddy,” which is what I thought when I heard Rick’s name. And a second after thinking that I felt like the worst, most shameful person on earth. I didn’t want to ask the question that next popped into my head, but I knew I had to. “Where’s Jeff?”
“Oh, he’s still out on the objective. He’s fine,” the soldier told me. I felt relieved and horrible at the same time. I flashed back once more to the last exchange I’d had with Rick.
The ramp was lowered and Barry and I went up. The guys inside were carrying Rick’s legs, lifting his body up from the floor. Rick’s frag vest had been pulled up in an attempt to cover his severely injured head and face. There was blood everywhere.
I reached down and grabbed Rick under one arm. Barry grabbed the other arm, and we lifted. We’d done casualty collection training dozens of times during simulated drills. During drills, the soldier playing a casualty would tense up his body to make it a little easier for us to carry him. But when Barry and I grabbed Rick, I was struck by how different this was. Rick was hard to carry. He wasn’t helping us out. This wasn’t a simulation. Rick was dead. We walked Rick to the nearby ambulance and they took him in.
•
The next few minutes are a bit of a blur, but what I remember is that more casualties were arriving, and as a result, Rick’s body was moved from inside the ambulance to outside of it to make way for the wounded. Meanwhile, other KIAs were being laid out, so that three soldiers were now lying in a row in plain sight on the ground. It was clear that a lot of soldiers were dealing with the aftermath of our first real battle and the real consequences of seeing friends killed in action.
One of the most important things in the field of battle is taking care of your dead. In fact, the creed of the Royals is “Never leave a Royal behind.” On the field, you want to get bodies out of sight as quickly as possible. It’s demoralizing for a soldier to witness a dead comrade during battle—especially when it’s someone of Rick’s stature. I went into the back of a LAV, grabbed a couple of body bags and got to work with some of the other guys. We picked up Rick and zipped him into a bag. One of the other fallen officers was Frank Mellish. For a second, I had a bit of hope, because he was on a stretcher, which meant he might have only been wounded. But once I saw soldiers approach and check his dog tags, I knew he was gone, a casualty of the round that took out the Zettelmeyer. The sad twist was that Frank Mellish and Rick Nolan had been friends for their whole careers, and now they were lying on the ground together. Next, I helped put Private William Cushley into a bag. I’ll never forget looking directly into his still-open eyes and saying, “Sorry, bro,” as I zipped up his body bag.
While this was happening, Sergeant Major Barnsley was brought over by two other walking wounded, who, despite their own injuries, had gotten the sergeant major to the casualty collection point before taking care of themselves. They sat him down on the ramp of the ambulance. He was bleeding from his ears, obviously concussed, but all he could focus on was his soldiers. He asked me, “How many dead?”
“Three so far,” I said, but even as I said it I regretted my words, because he recoiled with a look of anguish as if I’d just smacked him. I’m pretty sure that news hurt him more than any injuries he’d sustained.
I left the sergeant major. Barry and I went back to patrolling around the ambulance. We then noticed that our LAV—the one under Captain Norton’s lead—was now unstuck and was pulling away in the distance. Then the ambulance took off with the casualties. The bodies were loaded into another vehicle, and it took off as well. Now it was me, Kash and Barry standing there in the middle of nowhere, with no vehicle. My radio was still in the back of the battle captain’s LAV, so I didn’t have any direct communication.
The only allies around were a handful of Afghan soldiers in a gully in their unarmoured Fords. They were firing shots towards the enemy force. One guy was firing from his hip, hooting and hollering all the while. But once these fighters realized the Canadian LAVs were retreating, they took off in their trucks, too.
An American soldier trotted up to us. He was bloodied, but it didn’t seem to be any of his own blood. He asked me, “Have you seen a helmet anywhere? I went to help a casualty and I put my helmet down. Now I can’t find it.”
“Sorry, bro, I haven’t seen your helmet,” I said. I wasn’t even wearing my own helmet, so I wasn’t overly concerned about his. One of the last vehicles around, an American Humvee, pulled up. He jumped in and it took off before we could even think to stop it.
Barry, Kash and I were now pretty much accidentally stranded. All the Canadian vehicles were gone. We had no ride. We could see the unit gathering in a re-org on the other side of the Arghandab River, about five hundred metres away. If we wanted to catch them, we would have to go on foot across the river basin.
I turned to the guys. “Well, fellas, I guess we’re fucking running back.” I immediately thought of the movie Black Hawk Down, where a bunch of American soldiers run the Mogadishu Mile because their forces left them behind. We were staring down the same predicament ourselves in Afghanistan. We knew that once we crossed the river we were safe, but before that, we were a perfect target for Taliban gunfire.
We started running, with Barry in the lead position and Kash and me trailing behind. I was trying to keep an eye behind us for danger, looking for any signs of enemy activity. A few seconds later, I noticed another Canadian soldier off to the side of our path, standing by himself, staring off into the distance. As I got closer, I saw he had a medical bag over one shoulder and was holding a rifle on the other.
We ran over to him. “Hey bro, what are you doing?” I asked.
The medic was speechless, his eyes glazed and unfocused. I motioned to Barry and Kash. “You two keep going. We’ll catch up.”
I asked the medic again, “What are you doing? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I got left behind,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “But you better come with us because I think we’re the last ones.”
I went to take the medical bag off his shoulder and suddenly he snapped back to life. “Hey—it’s okay,” he said. “I can haul my own shit.”
“Good enough for me,” I said, and I pushed him ahead.
We started running back, with some intermittent gunfire spraying around us. My bigger concern was that if we were spotted by the enemy, they would use a mortar or a recoilless rifle to target us. And if they did, it would be game over for us.
As soon as we got to the other side of the riverbed, the shooting behind us stopped. It was almost as if we had crossed an imaginary finish line. We closed on the line of Charles Company’s LAVs a couple hundred metres away. They hadn’t withdrawn all the way back to our starting position, which had me thinking we were simply regrouping and would shortly recommence the offensive. I expected to hear the sound of our machine-gun turrets re-engaging the enemy or maybe the 25 millimetre firing off a few rounds, signalling we were preparing to assault. But instead, there was an eerie silence as we approached our troops.
We came puffing up to our guys, and I went over to Sergeant Fawcett, who seemed to have taken charge after various men had fallen. “Is there anything we can do?” I asked him.
“Not for now. We’re securing this perimeter and that’s all I’ve been told,” he said.
“Are we going back today to finish Objective Rugby?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been told anything,” he replied.
I turned back to the scene around me. There was a LAV nearby with the ramp down. A handful of soldiers were inside, just staring off into space with vacant expressions. They told me they had to recover the body of a KIA, Sergeant Shane Stachnik. It was a gruesome scene. He was sticking out of his vehicle during combat when an anti-tank round hit. He never stood a chance. One of the soldiers who’d recovered Sergeant Stachnik’s body had his trigger finger on his grenade launcher. His buddy was trying to console him, but the guy was sobbing uncontrollably. “It’s not going to be okay,” he cried.
I looked down at the grenade launcher and said, “Is that thing loaded?”
The soldier looked up at me in slow motion. He released his finger from the grenade launcher and opened it up. I was glad to see it was empty. He was in such a state of shock that he hadn’t even realized his finger was on the trigger.
“Okay, guys, let’s get it together. We’re not done. We haven’t taken the objective yet, so we’re going back in,” I said.
I went in search of some senior officers to get a sense of where things stood. Finally, I found Major Sprague.
“We’re going to be pulling back now,” he said.
Why we wouldn’t just pick right up and go back at these guys to reclaim the white schoolhouse was beyond me. We had lost four good soldiers during the fighting, but we had also kicked the enemy’s ass and they had suffered at least ten times the number of casualties. We had now “seen the elephant,” as the Romans used to say, meaning we knew what to expect in combat, so why wouldn’t we carry on the assault? The job wasn’t finished. We had aircraft and artillery—two weapons the Taliban fighters didn’t. If we pushed ahead fast, we would steamroll them in no time flat. And they wouldn’t be expecting it.
But Major Sprague was ordering a full withdrawal to Masum Ghar. We obeyed orders, but it felt like we were going with our tails between our legs. As we were withdrawing, behind us, the white schoolhouse, the cause of so much pain and expenditure, was being levelled by air strikes and artillery until it was a useless pile of rubble.
Major Sprague later called a meeting behind his vehicle of as many troops as he could rally. I found a rock to sit on, and as I was taking a seat, the medic who I’d found dazed in the field came over and shook my hand. He thanked me for pulling him out of there. “Name’s JP. Can I sit next to you? I feel like I owe you.”
“Don’t worry about it, bro,” I said. He seemed to feel better sitting next to me, and I kind of felt the same way.
Finally, Major Sprague stood up in front of the group. His mood was sombre. “Fuck this,” he said. “We’re going back first thing tomorrow morning. We’re going to finish this job.”
There was a quiet resolve and determination that went through all of us gathered there. These were exactly the words I wanted to hear. We needed to do this for the sake of the men we’d lost. We headed back to our spot on the mountain, where we were to spend the night.
Guns, bombs, bullets, fire, destruction and blood. That was the battlefield we survived that day. I had been training for it since 1994. But it wasn’t finished yet. The next morning, we would deal with another set of air strikes—only not in the way we expected.